[CHAPTER XI]
MR. FRAZER'S THEORY OF TOTEMISM
Mr. Frazer's latest theory—Closely akin to that of Professor Spencer—Arunta totemism the most archaic—Proof of Arunta primitiveness—Their ignorance of the facts of procreation—But the more primitive south-eastern tribes are not ignorant of the facts—Proof from Mr. Howitt—Yet south-eastern tribes are subject to Mr. Frazer's supposed causes of ignorance—Mr. Frazer's new theory cited—No account taken of primitive tribes of the southern interior—Similar oversight by Mr. Howitt as regards religion—Examples of this oversight—Social advance does not explain the religion of tribes which have not made the social advance—Theory of borrowing needed by Mr. Howitt—Mr. Frazer's suggestion as to the origin of exogamy—Objections to the suggestion.
Throughout these chapters, when there was occasion to mention the totemic theories of Mr. J. G. Frazer, we have spoken of them with reserve, as the theory of this or that date. Fortunately his article, "The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism among the Australian Aborigines," in the Fortnightly Review (September 1905), enables us to report Mr. Frazer's latest, perhaps final, hypothesis. "After years of sounding," he says, "our plummets seem to touch bottom at last."
In essence Mr. Frazer's latest hypothesis is that of Professor Baldwin Spencer. He accepts Pirrauru as "group marriage," and holds that the Arunta retain the most archaic form of totemism now known to exist. In Chapter III. we believe ourselves to have proved that Pirrauru is not "group marriage"; and that the "classificatory names for relationships "do not demonstrate the existence of "group marriage" in the relatively near, or of promiscuity in the very distant past.
In Chapter IV. we show that, by Professor Spencer's statement, the Arunta are in a highly advanced social state for Australians. Inheritance of local office (Alatunjaship) and of the paternal totemic ritual goes in the male, not in the female line of descent, which is confessedly the more archaic. (Mr. Frazer, however, now thinks this point open to doubt.) The institutions are of a local character; and the ceremonials are of what Professor Spencer considers the later and much more complex type. Arunta totemism, Mr. Spencer shows, depends on the idea of ancestral spirits attached to stone churinga nanja, amulets of various forms usually inscribed with archaic patterns, and these churinga nanja, with this belief about them, are not found outside of the Arunta region. Without them, the Arunta system of totemism does not, and apparently cannot exist On this head Mr. Frazer says nothing. For these and many other reasons, most of which have been urged by Dr. Durkheim, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Marett, and other students, we have explained the Arunta system as a late, isolated, and apparently unique institution. As the Arunta ceremonials and institutions, with inheritance in the male line and local magistracies hereditable in the male line, are at the opposite pole from the primitive, while the Arunta totemic system reposes on an isolated superstition connected with manufactured stone objects, and not elsewhere found in Australia, it has seemed vain to regard Arunta totemism as the most archaic.
This, however, is the present hypothesis of Mr. Frazer, as of Mr. Spencer, and he adduces a proof of Arunta primitiveness concerning which too little was said in our Chapter IV. The Arunta system "ignores altogether the intercourse of the sexes as the cause of offspring; and further, it ignores the tie of blood on the maternal as well as the paternal side."[1] The theory "denies implicitly, and the natives themselves deny explicitly, that children are the fruit of the commerce of the sexes. So astounding an ignorance of natural causation cannot but date from a past immeasurably remote."[2]
Now when the Arunta "ignore the tie of blood on the maternal side," they prove too much. They ignore that of which they are not ignorant. Not being idiots, they are well aware of the maternal tie of blood; but they do not permit it to affect the descent of the totem, which is regulated by their isolated superstition, the doctrine of reincarnation combined with the churinga nanja belief. Nor do they ignore fatherhood, as we saw, in affairs of inheritance of local office and totemic rites.